It’s going to be quite an undertaking, the extensive renovation works planned to relieve passenger congestion at Victoria Station, one of London’s most famous and busiest transport hubs (p16). The designs make it look more like a giant rabbit warren waiting to be unveiled on completion under the thriving, and often overcrowded area of the capital’s west.

The engineering intricacies involved, in some pretty tight spaces, will throw up a host of challenges specific to the project, and, as with most schemes undertaken these days, the designers and contractors will doubtless step up and make it happen.

It’s a refreshing reminder of the degree of variation open to the world of underground civils, and a good one to re-iterate that tunnelling isn’t just the construction of long holes in the ground, albeit the substantial meat and drink of the industry.

In T&TI we have reported on a host of alternative uses for underground space. There have been wine caverns in California, gas storage caverns in Scandinavia, seed storage facilities in the arctic, underground museums in Japan, bank vault access and penitentiary egress tunnels the world over (although not condoned in any way shape or form by T&TI, the BTS, or its editorial board as sound pieces of civil engineering!), nuclear storage networks in the US, underground pieces of artwork in the Canary Islands, to name but a few. The list could go on and on, and does.

But then thinking about it, there is a massive variation in the works involved purely in more traditional type of tunnel projects i.e, TBM, drill and blast, NATM, perforex, immersed tube. Just within TBMs we have EPBMs, Mixshields, slurry shields, hard rock grippers, DSU’s etc, to suit a range of diameters and a host of varying geologies. And on top of this, the works are on-going the world over and it’s you with the opportunity to get to the sorts of places most people only dream about.

So when that inevitable feeling of career despondency kicks in, as it does with most people in all walks of life, just ask some poor soul stuck behind a desk day-in-day-out what the future holds for them. For the tunnelling engineer, it could be a lot worse.

Finally, just a quick note to say that with the recent company change comes the inevitable new email addresses. So, from now, any correspondence to the editor, positive or negative, should be sent to: tthomas@tunnelsonline.info

I look forward to hearing from you…


Tris